You hear a baby cooing as it drifts off to sleep. What do you feel, and how do you react? Are you happy, content, or in love? Do you snuggle the baby even closer?
Now, you hear the same baby crying in the middle of the night. What are you feeling now, and how do you react? Depending on the experience, we experience many emotions towards the same person. 
Emotional intelligence is recognizing your emotions, such as happiness, sadness, anger, or excitement and knowing how to manage your feelings respectfully. It is also recognizing different emotions in others.
Here is an example. 
Let's say your child accidentally spills juice on your white living room carpet. Our initial reaction as parents are to yell and scream at our children out of frustration and anger instead of using emotional intelligence, which is a better way to handle the situation. Let me explain. 
Our emotions have the upper hand because our brains are hard-wired that way. We react instead of respond, whether positively or negatively. 
Our perceptions or impressions of events enter at the base of our brain, the spinal cord. Everything we see, smell, taste, and touch travels through our limbic system to our cerebral cortex, which is at the front of the brain.
When our perceptions or impressions pass through our limbic system, we experience our emotions or feelings toward the event. The same event then travels to the cerebral cortex, the rational part of our brain.
So, to be emotionally intelligent, we need to communicate between our limbic system, our emotions, and our cerebral cortex, which is the rational thinking part of our brain. 
For the example above, you see juice on your white carpet, which is your perception or impression of the event. Your senses enter your spinal cord. Then it travels to the limbic system, your emotions, causing you to feel anger and frustration before it reaches your cerebral cortex, the rational thinking when you calm down, ask what happened and work out a solution to keep you both with good self-esteem. You for not yelling and feeling ashamed of being out of control, and your child for not being the brunt of the yelling when it was an accident. 
To better understand emotional intelligence, here are three key competencies that can help you evaluate your abilities:

Self-awareness
How to Manage Your Emotions
Be empathetic

Self-awareness: Self-aware people can identify and acknowledge their emotions and how they affect their behaviour.
How to Become More Self-Aware

Pay attention to your feelings: Take time to notice how you feel throughout the day. Are you happy, sad, or frustrated? Understanding your emotions is the first step to becoming more self-aware. Also, don't judge your feelings as positive or negative because doing so prevents you from understanding your feelings. Judging your feelings compounds more emotion on what you are already feeling and stops the original feeling from running its course.

I learned there are five core feelings and variations of those five. The five core emotions are happiness, sadness, anger, fear and shame. ...

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